


December, 2006: Michoacán

by RoryKurago



Series: Kurago [1]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon, Pre-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-26
Updated: 2014-12-26
Packaged: 2018-03-03 15:12:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2855378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoryKurago/pseuds/RoryKurago
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s zero-dark-twenty, Michoacán is a hellzone, there’s a ban on cook-fires, and someone down the far end of the rifle line is singing. You and Javi are not friends. You haven’t done the things that will make you Matador Fury, or land you in prison. You have never heard the word Jaeger and it will be eight years before you even know why you should. But you know who you're going to die beside.</p>
            </blockquote>





	December, 2006: Michoacán

**Author's Note:**

> Technically part of 31 Days of PacRim, but it deserves its own listing. Fits in with an incomplete piece of mine about these boys called Sparks Of Distant Flares. Javi and Guill are riflemen in the 2006 Army incursion under Calderón's directives to wage war on the drug cartels.

 

It’s zero-dark-twenty, Michoacán is a hellzone, there’s a ban on cook-fires, and someone down the far end of the rifle line is singing.

You can’t leave: your squad is lying in wait to ambush a convoy coming at the only bridge over this ravine for sixty miles. You’ve been lying in a trench for two days. You were supposed to bug out to a town twenty klicks west yesterday to help hold another bridge but the insurgents blew it trying to get it back from D Company. This is now their only option. So here you sit. ( _Marrones,_ said Iberra when the orders came through, shrugging.)

He’s been at it for an hour. Singing.

You know who it is – that guy from Basic. He’s made it all the way to Amazing Grace—and you’re ready to stand up, walk down the line and crack him in the nose with the butt of your carbine.

“ – _twas grace that taught~ my~ heart~”_

You dig you back into the gravel of the trench, calculating distances. You want coffee. Or about a galleon of water. Or—

“ _I don't want a lot this Christmas~_ ”

It’s too far.

“Ay, hermano!” you call down the line, quiet but carrying. “Sabes que quiero por Navidad?”

“Un poni?” Iberra mutters beside you, slouched back against the trench with his hat over his face. In the faint starlight, you can just barely make out his outline. Maybe it’s not too far. The trench is probably deep enough…

“Paz?” grunts Madero as you scuttle past him.

The conscript looks up at you when you make it to his post, and his eyes glitter in the black. He’s fucking grinning.

“Sí,” you say. “Paz. Y _tranquilidad_.” You grit the last part out like a curse; Javi just grins in the dark, letting his head rock back against the trench lip. His teeth show more cleanly than his eyes. You still want to hit him in the face with a carbine.

You are not friends.

You haven’t done the things that will land you in prison, or make you Matador Fury.

You have never heard the word _Jaeger_ and it will be eight years before you even know why you should.

“Silencio,” you mutter, and you know that he hears. “Quiero _silencio._ ”

He shrugs and makes a show of checking his magazine despite the fact that the squad to a man has done that at least three times since they dug in.

You don’t know that this will not be the last pitched battle you will fight in your lifetime.

But you do know who you’ll probably die beside.

You know Javi. You know him well enough to know he’s the kind of man to start singing to lift his spirits, and raise those around him—and he knows _you_ well enough to wait until you’re back at your own hole before starting up on _Hark The Herald Angels._ And he knows you hate carols, well-executed or otherwise. He knows you hate the optimism.

Iberra chuckles into his hat at your grunt of disgust.

 

Madero bites it when the ambush finally rolls around.

 

Iberra shortly after, grabbing a returned grenade to pitch it back at the cartel gunmen for Round II.

 

When the firefight is over and the rebels retreat (are forced) back to the other side of the ravine by the detonation of charges strapped to the underbelly of the bridge, reduced to taking potshots at the occasional head that pokes up from the squad’s trench, you stand up and walk the length of the trench to where Javi slumps against a trench wall, facing towards the ravine this time. Dawn is coming as you drop to the ground beside him. One of Suarez’s cigarettes hangs lit from two fingers and a wrist hooked on one knee. Suarez won’t need them any more.

“Quería un poni, cuando era niño,” Javi says reflectively. He takes another pull on the cigarette. You don’t remember if he smoked in Basic.

You held the bridge.

You know who you are going to die beside. It just won’t be today.

Ten years from now, you will call the colour the sky looks right then _kaiju blue_.

Sighing, you take the cigarette from Javi’s hand and drag on it. You speak English; it seems appropriately cynical. “Christmas songs, hey.”

This shitstorm began on the eleventh, and you’ve been out here two weeks.

Javi lets out a sluggish stream of smoke that’s measured enough for him to not be cussing out the furrow carved through his cheek by rock shrapnel, and takes back the cigarette. “Sí.”


End file.
